Thoughts provoked by SEP Belief article

Last week I wrote the following to Ted Poston:

"I’ve more or less abandoned hope in the notion of belief simpliciter. It’s going in the epistemic scrap-heap on top of knowledge." (See also my previous comments here.)

The next day the SEP added this article on belief. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Tom Kelly's entry on Evidence (see previous post) so the week was quite a feast for thought. I'm going to begin blogging through selected sections.

The first section is an inventory of theories about what beliefs are and as usual I'm left baffled by their relationship. Representationalism and functionalism seem to be presented as alternatives, yet it seems possible to combine them in various ways. The same is sometimes true also of presentations of internalism and externalism or foundationalism and coherentism. It's always easier--for me at any rate--to grasp the lay of the logical land if it's divided up in mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive ways. [By the way, for a great survey of theories of belief see Paul Weirich, ‘Belief and Acceptance,’ in Niiniluoto and Wolenski, Handbook of Epistemology, (Netherlands: Springer, 2004) 499-520.] Then historically held views can be placed in logical space in a way that is theoretically illuminating.

I find myself in the odd position of finding accounts of belief to be very informative at each stage and yet at the end I feel like I have *less* of an idea of what belief is supposed to be. So for now I'm inclined to stand by my previous statement.
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The second part is where it gets interesting from my point of view: Types, Degrees, and Relatives of Belief.

$2.4 "Degree of Belief"

W.r.t. degrees of belief, he talks about degrees of confidence equivalently with degrees of belief. I do this sometimes myself, but in a formal setting I like to distinguish between degrees of confidence--which seem to be closely associated with practical affairs, whether betting or assertion or what have you whereas I think there's a purely epistemic notion which I'd rather call degrees of *certainty* rather than degrees of *belief* since, as I say above, I don't know what beliefs are so how can I know what degrees of them are. I feel that I have a much better grasp of what certainty would be. [And talk of degrees of certainty have a much stronger historical basis than talk of degrees of belief from what I have read.] I do wish he'd said much more about degrees of belief. I might say a bit about a new take I have on degrees of certainty in the near future.


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$2.5 "Belief and Acceptance"

Schwitzgebel gives what appears to me to be a fairly standard account of acceptance as a tentative inquiry-stopping repose in a well-enough-confirmed hypothesis, saying "If the theory is accepted, the scientist ceases inquiring into its truth and becomes willing to ground her own research and interpretations in that theory; the contrary if the theory is not accepted." The only writer I've examined in detail on acceptance is one of it's biggest defenders, Kyburg, and this seems to be very much in line with what he says.

He points out that there have been many plausible counterexamples to the identification of belief with acceptance but doesn't say much more. It may be that--as even Kaplan argues--Orthodox Bayesians were right that the folk concept of belief is incoherent and we need a substitute. Kaplan's substitute is assertion in the context of inquiry. Lehrer's seems to be a sort of second-order belief. I think the philosophy of science version of acceptance might just do the trick as a belief substitute. This kind of acceptance seems to accord well both with the action-guiding nature of belief as well as with the scholastic definition of believing as to think with assent, where assent is something pretty voluntaristic.
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$2.6 "Belief and Knowledge"

Schwitzgebel doesn't say much here. He only mentions that the "traditional analysis" of knowledge takes knowledge to be a species of belief. I'd really like to have seen some questioning of whether this is true. Earl Conee is very careful in his classes to specify that belief *or some kind of similar doxastic attitude* is required for knowledge, but he is careful not to commit to the belief account. Lehrer explicitly switches to acceptance as the DA required for K. Williamson prominently abandons the assumption, and the whole Ancient and Medieval tradition *opposes* doxa/opinio and gnosis/episteme/scientia as two quite different kinds of states with not even the same *domains*.
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$2.1 "Occurrent Versus Dispositional Belief" & $2.2 "Implicit Versus Explicit Belief"

Now these sections seem to fumble an important distinction or else the philosophy of mind is not doing well in the belief category. Witness this:
"...representationalists have more commonly responded to this issue [mathematical beliefs] by drawing a distinction between explicit and implicit belief. One believes P implicitly (or tacitly) if one believes P, but the mind does not possess, in a belief-like way, a representation with that content. (Philosophers sometimes use the term dispositional to refer to beliefs that are implicit in the present sense—but this invites confusion with the occurrent-dispositional distinction discussed above (§2.1)."

That's got to be one of the most bizarre definitions I've ever seen taken seriously by an analytic philosopher. So I can "believe" p, but not host the content that p in a belief-like way. Perhaps there's some big fancy story that makes sense out of this, but I doubt it. I doubt it in part because

Audi's already distinguished between dispositional beliefs and dispositions to believe. It's hard to analyze dispositions, but they're there and there's a difference between non-occurantly believing some content which I've explicitly considered in the past and being so constructed or poised as to assent to a proposition if I were to consider it in normal circumstances.
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$3 "The Content of Beliefs"

Schwitzgebel notes the distinction between the coarse-grained and fine-grained theories of propositions and mentions it's main pro and con. The con, of course, is the problem of necessary truths all having the same content. The pro is supposed to be, as Stalnaker claims, that the propositions-as-sets view can easily accommodate the apparently ubiquitous phenomenon of variable richness of belief content. I believed that math used proofs when I was in grammar school. I still believe that same proposition, but--boy oh boy--has the content of that belief seemed to grow.

What seems like an obvious reply here is that various theories of structured propositions can just as easily accommodate this. In fact, I'd say even better. For example take my view that propositions are structures of concepts. What does the work for the coarse grained theory is set theory. But concepts can also give rise to set-theoretic properties. Each concept can specify set-building instructions. The concept redness can be used to build the set of red things.

The advantage I see in the structure-of-concepts view is that it allows both content of the subject and the predicate of an attribution to vary. So in my example of believing--in grammar school and now--that math uses proofs, both my concept of math and my concept of proof have changed. At different stages they've changed in different ways and at different rates. It seems to me the alleged advantage of the coarse view mentioned by Stalnaker would gloss right over such differences and, once again, come out missing distinctions.
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So I still don't think I have much of an idea of what these belief thingies are supposed to be and I don't see that they explain much. The degree-theorist still might want to address the issues of occurrence vs. disposition as well as the content issue. It seems to me these might feature in explaining and assessing behavior and in pursuing epistemic goals.

Keywords: belief, certainty, acceptance, knowledge, propositions, content, concepts, bayesianism